The sun is not his friend because the CH-47F Chinook he flies is a big, tempting target — a headline waiting to happen if one goes down. It’s a workhorse in this war, picking up soldiers, contractors, equipment, food and water and ferrying it across the country.

Think of this bird as a tractor-trailer rig in the sky. Two Chinooks in the air are worth nine armored vehicles on the ground. That’s how many trucks can be taken off the still-dangerous roads of Iraq every time one of these dual-rotor helicopters flies.

Several from the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Combat Aviation Brigade’s Bravo Company, 2-4 General Support Aviation Battalon, take to the sky each evening – after sunset. They fly throughout Baghdad, as well as the central and southeastern parts of the country.

The cargo bay isn’t as big as a C-5A, which looks as large as a football field. But you can pack a lot of folks into a Chinook, which has the feel of a very cramped city bus. It’s much bigger than a UH-60 Black Hawk and includes space for equipment and food in the center of the cargo bay as well as soldiers on each side.

Like Black Hawks, they fly in pairs barely seen from the ground, taking soldiers to a dozen or so bases in this region as much of the country sleeps. Some are coming back from leave, others headed home. And still others are off to a new mission in a land that is more peaceful than it has been in several years but is still a war zone – a place where violent death is the one constant, particularly during the fall and spring.

(Sig Christenson/Express-News)

CW 3 Phillip Lopez (right), 37, of Patterson, La., stands inside the large cargo bay of a CH-47F Chinook, as Spc. Johnathon Pryde, 26, of Arlington, walks to the rear of the aircraft.

As tough as things are on the chopper, especially on long missions, Lopez knows it’s even harder on the ground.

“I can’t compare it to anything like what the troops on the ground are doing,” he said. “I know they have it harder than us. Their living conditions and everything else are probably worse than ours, so I hate to complain about anything. But yeah, at the end of the night, you’re spent.”

They fall into bed when the broiling desert sun begins its brutal ascent. If they’re lucky, the Chinook drivers get to eat breakfast before they snooze. Bacon and eggs, please hold the V-8.

The unit’s pilots and crews keep hours that are odd in an Army that typically is up and about by dawn. But again, these are virtual vampires. They come to work late in the afternoon, spin up their rotors at twilight and take off after dark.

Once in the air, it’s all about survival. Insurgents in this country have shot down a number of helicopters through the years. Just thinking about that sends shivers down the spines of anyone flying Iraq’s unfriendly skies. Neither Lopez nor Spc. Johnathon Pryde like to talk about that much, but they echo the point of a pilot who last year explained why he flew high and low and at varying speeds in the months after a series of shoot-downs.

“There’s nothing good down there,” the man, a battalion commander, told me in April 2007.

“We’re a really big aircraft and stand out. It’s probably pretty easy to pick out in a blue sky,” Pryde, 26, of Arlington, Texas, said of his Chinook.

“We’re trying to do things in the safest, best way possible no matter what the situation dictates,” added Lopez, a Chinook pilot with close to 600 combat hours in the cockpit. “That is the overall responsibility that we owe the people we’re hauling around.”

So you don’t take chances?

A silly reporter question, of course. It’s like asking Dracula why his henchman stands guard near that musty old casket from sunup to sundown.